What do you really know about your traffic?

Most businesses are spending time and money on marketing activities aimed at boosting their website traffic either through SEO, PPC, social media posts and advertising or other means, but what do we know about these visitors?

There is no doubt that there has been a shift in power from the seller to the buyer in the sales process with the amount of information available online, but with less than 10% of website visitors filling out a contact form—what can be done to identify the other 90%?

Fortunately there are now sophisticated tools available—such as SharpSpring and Hubspot—that provide a multi-tiered approach to identifying and engaging with anonymous website visitors. In the example of SharpSpring—the tool used by Brand Xperiences—there are three key approaches:

Visitor ID
This is the most basic method of identifying website visitors based on their IP address. This is particularly useful when the visitor is coming from a business location and is therefore more useful for B2B marketing than B2C. If Visitor ID can identify the business, it will present any known decision makers within that organisation.

Gated content
This is where a website offers access to valuable information in return for some identifying data. The level of data will depend on the value of the content but the default is email address, from which you can normally ascertain the name of the individual and their business. Other data could include their role, areas of interest and readiness to buy. The key is to ensure that the value of the content outweighs the value of the data.

Personalisation
Most website visitors will value a personalised experience that is tailored to their needs and many will be prepared to give up their personal data to achieve this. Please note that this approach is only valid when the data requested is used solely to personalise the experience and the tools are available to deliver such personalisation on a consistent basis.

Once a website visitor has been converted from anonymous to a known contact then marketing can be carried out at a one-to-one level and the nurturing process can begin until they are ready to purchase.

To find out more about marketing automation and its role in the lead generation process, check out our related article below 'what is marketing automation'.

To see how marketing automation tools from SharpSpring and Hubspot compare, download our free e-book.